


but who cares, still The Louvre

by tritonreverse



Series: you know what that is? growth [2]
Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Identity Reveal, Internal Dialogue, a lot of internal woe about a crush, loosely described scary situation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 05:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18359321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tritonreverse/pseuds/tritonreverse
Summary: Sometimes the best thinking out loud happens inside of your head, and sometimes you realize that even though you swore yourself to a life of books, cats, and plants, your heart has other plans.





	but who cares, still The Louvre

**Author's Note:**

> This fic brought to you by (a) that time I went to New York in August, walked 8 miles while my heels bled into my Sperrys, and sweated more than I usually do in Texas (b) my newfound love for these two idiots (c) Lorde’s The Louvre.

i.  _summer_ _slipped us underneath her tongue_

There’s nothing special about the day she realizes, nothing in the air but the rising heat off the platform, the special kind of stagnant heat that collects in cities, and while it’s better than being in Manhattan _(which, she’s quite sure Manhattan in August is what the entire world will feel like since all the adults in charge are quite determined to fuck them all over re: global warming, “Stark Renewable Energy” aside, where the hell do they think the metals for their batteries come from)_ it’s still like being slowly smothered. It’s not yet too hot to read, though, not yet at that unbearable temperature where just staring into space across the tracks is all you can do, so she’s leaning up against a column, waiting for the train with the company of Alianne of Pirate’s Swoop and Dovesary Balitang _(so sue her, she’s back on her Tamora Pierce kick, she can’t just read the classics all the time)_.

She notices Peter-and-Ned out of the corner of her eye between chapters, on a glance up to the sign to see how much longer she’ll be waiting _(and it’s surely lying, they’ve all been here more than four minutes, what kind of an idiot does the MTA think she is)_ . They’re in her orbit, close enough to make her feel included if she wanted to close the book, not close enough to make it weird, and in some deep discussion about whether or not the Hero’s Journey being repeated from the original Star Wars to The Force Awakens cheapens the latter or adds layers. It’s something that’s just interesting enough that she’s thinking about actually contributing and then Peter looks up, catches her looking, and grins that open-hearted grin of his, and before she can think _boys are for losers_ she’s smiling back.

Luckily for her, the platform under their feet rumbles with the arrival of their train at exactly that moment, saving her from having to come up with some response to the widening of his eyes, and from having to actually examine her own feelings, something that would have to happen later and definitely not in public. She shoved her way onto the train, leaving the nerd twins behind, and sank into the corner seat, forcing her mind back into the world of politics and secrecy and crows.

It’s only later that evening, after the last dregs of homework are done, the summer AcDec study packets have reached an acceptable stopping place, and MJ has admitted to herself that she’s out of ways to procrastinate this deeply uncomfortable conversation with herself that she flops backwards onto her bed.

So, she might like Peter Parker.

MJ’s always prided herself on her ability to break down a problem into component parts, attack something from all angles, and dissecting her maybe crush on Midtown’s resident Star Wars lorekeeper is something that definitely deserves this approach. Crushes, by nature, aren’t practical things and so maybe she could just reason herself back to her previously firmly held viewpoint that high school boys weren’t worth it and she’d wait until college to find a partner of any kind _(if ever, she’s heard enough from her older friends online about how miserable the dating scene is like, in general, maybe she’ll just get three plants and a cat)._

So. Parker. Obvious things first: He’s cute enough, just like, existing, all soft-looking brown hair and sweet eyes, but when he smiles it’s like the sun, and when he smiles at you it’s like you’re being let in on something more than you thought could exist here in the fume-laden streets of your hometown. For a weedy-looking kid he’s deceptively strong, and MJ would be lying to herself if she hadn’t occasionally caught herself thinking about the one time he’d forgotten his gym shirt, had to take a too-small loaner, and had stretched, revealing alarmingly Sam Mikulakian abs.

Aesthetics aside, what really made Parker attractive was the little things, she reasoned. His deep loyalty, strong to the point of stupidity. His intellect, and the disarming way he cared about knowledge and learning - not a weapon, but a joy to be shared. Actually, the way he cared - about Ned, about his aunt, about the incredibly nerdy things he could have hidden away behind a cool facade _(which, if she was being honest, was something she was guilty of. She’d had a soft spot for Doctor Who even before the announcement of the female Doctor [though, about time] and had hidden it behind being too affectless and intellectual for television)_ , about Liz...

Well, he’d taken a break from caring for a bit, it seemed, a poorly-fitted break in which he fell asleep in class and did homework at lunch and whispered to Ned and quit everything’d that had made him Peter - and MJ still thought back at that time, thought about investing her emotional life in a guy who had seemed willing to throw everything away for...there had to have been something. No guy like Peter, not the Parker she’d known peripherally for six years, would have dropped everything for _nothing_.

He was back, for the most part, back in AcDec practice, back to poring over the latest LEGO catalogue with Ned at lunch, and back to trying to get Michelle to actually join in on their nerdfests. She’d said he could call her MJ, but hadn’t expected that to mean that she got pulled (or, well, invited) into movie nights and coffee hangs and all those around school spaces that meant she got to know more and more about him - but. But she couldn’t forget the way he’d looked, both lost and and defiant, quitting band, quitting robotics, quitting AcDec, disappearing from his little corner of the world.

She rolled over, burying her face in her pillow and letting out a deep sigh of frustration. Apparently, her idiot heart had been disobeying her head for longer than she’d thought, disguising its intentions as _I like to draw people in crisis_ and _I only care about the team_ and _I observe so I don’t get close_. Yes, Peter Parker had a brief fifth-of-a-life crisis and abandoned sense, but he once stopped Eugene from bullying a transfer kid by deliberately tripping over his own feet between them. He never paid attention in Chemistry but still was their anchor on the science questions. He looked like he should be training in Colorado Springs, but had a smile that made her insides do things she’d rather they not do, and had noticed when her studied aloofness had turned into loneliness - and had respected her need to be alone. He offered, he didn’t take. A low-ass bar, if you asked her, but...one that mattered.

Heaven and the main branch of the New York Public Library help her, Michelle Jones likes Peter Parker.

 

* * *

 

 ii.  _i overthink your punctuation use, not my fault_

**Google Hangouts - michelle.e2.jones@gmail.com**

**Hangout with jediknightparker@gmail.com**

 

> **3:04 PM**
> 
> Peter Parker: ...why is there art in my summer acadec packet
> 
> Peter Parker: also ned says hi
> 
> Michelle Jones: I don’t know, why is there?
> 
> Michelle Jones: Hi back, loser.
> 
> Peter Parker: youre the one who put them together????
> 
> Michelle Jones: Did I add you on gchat just for you to ask stupid questions?
> 
> Michelle Jones: You need to be more well-rounded, and you can just ask Stark to let you use the company MoMA membership.
> 
> Michelle Jones: Also, it’s literally the second day of summer vacation, why are you looking at the packet? Not that I don’t approve of this, but like, vacation, dude.
> 
> **5:01 PM**
> 
> Michelle Jones: hey?

 

MJ glared at the clock at in the top-right corner of the screen. Idiot Parker, messaging her out of nowhere, then disappearing, and here she was worrying that she’d hurt his feelings, because suddenly she _cared_ about what Parker thought of her. This wasn’t fair, none of it was, the fact that she’d spent most of the day trying to read or work on a painting and instead kept drifting off every ten minutes into thinking about his smile or the way he’d said “hey, we have to hang out this summer!” or GOD the fact that she just wanted to know what getting a real Peter Parker hug felt like?

And then out of nowhere her phone had chimed, Parker lighting up her Hangouts app with the question she, honestly, had known he’d ask. Yes, it was true that Mr. Harrington had suggested that the summer would be a good time for everyone to pick up a second area of competency, but it was MJ who picked art for Peter. Art was her thing, right? And maybe, maybe some part of her that she’d die rather than confess was hoping that Peter would ask her for help on it. She could have given him economics, but that would have meant pairing him with Flash and she was just sparing them all the headaches that would cause, something the team could thank her for later.

Sighing heavily, she pulled up Twitter on her phone, because at least she could drown her personal angst in anger about the world in general. It was the fourth tweet down that caught her eye.

> @NYCAlerts: Spider-Man stops mugging, caught on camera  
>  See More...

The tweet embedded in the article _(ugh, and that was a paper for another time, the stealing of content by aggregators who weren’t even paying the people doing the work enough)_ had a shaky, vertically filmed video of Queens’ own superhero making a rare daylight appearance, and a timestamp of an hour ago. She had to admit, it was impressive, the casual way the ridiculous figure got between the mugger and the woman whose purse he was after, the smooth way he separated gun from dude, and the fact that it was done without so much as a thrown punch.

She hadn’t thought much about the disastrous D.C. trip _(other than, you know, the win)_ much, but seeing “The Spidey Sensation!” in action brought back everything about that day - the cool breeze turning to warm panic as she realized that her friends were- _her team_ was up there, probably not out of the elevator, and no matter whether or not they’d chosen to explore a phallic symbol of white male American supremacist belief they didn’t deserve to die for it. The slight figure of someone that she’d honestly previously dismissed as a crank launching himself up and at the tower, the way Liz had shaken for hours after, holding onto MJ’s hand tightly, not letting anyone else see how terrified she’d been.

Now, though, MJ was thinking. It was weird, right, that a New York City-based superdude was in Washington, D.C., right when she was, and it was odd, yes, that daytime sightings had gone down the last three or four months they’d been in school, and it could be a coincidence that he’d shown his be-spandexed self before dark the literal day after school let out, and that Parker’d shown up to class and to Acadec practice and had disappeared from gchat and MJ sat bolt upright on her bed and threw a pillow across the room.

How had she been _so stupid_? She was the observant one! It all lined up, down to the fact that Spider-Man was shorter than you’d think, if you’d grown up seeing Thor and Captain America towering over the general population. No, Spider-Man was short because he was a 15-year-old idiot who had maxed out his loyalty and chosen common sense as his dump stat.

MJ grabbed her laptop and pulled up the most comprehensive Spidey Tumblr page that she definitely did not have bookmarked _(okay she would not ruin her dash with this but a girl’s gotta stay informed)_ . Post after post, her feeling of certainty only grew. Of course Peter Parker would stop to grab a kid’s drawing as it flew down the street, or act as a crossing guard for an elderly lady and her dog, or get caught sipping a boba tea on a fire escape, the mask pulled up just enough to get a straw through _(the tags on this one were #spbobaman #just unfollow me now)_ because even though he’d never been a Boy Scout, he could have earned basically every badge.

It was only when she scrolled back nine months that something else crept in, a sinking, cement-y feeling in her stomach. The blog only touched on some of the rumors around the night that a Stark Industries plane had crashed to earth on the Coney Island beach, mainly because it hadn’t, at the time, been attributed to Spider-Man, but there’d been some long-distance cell phone shots of a guy in a copy-cat costume floating around that claimed to be from that night. That was also the night that Peter had broken Liz’s heart, had disappeared from the face of the earth, and then hadn’t come back to school for a week, pleading illness when he did finally show his face again.

She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. This was unfair - not only did she have a crush on Peter Parker, but Peter Parker was a masked vigilante flying around Queens in a suit that definitely _did not_ have “property of Stark Industries” written all over it, and here she was, Michelle Jones, sardonic and sarcastic and worrying about if she’d annoyed him over gchat _(okay, it was slightly a relief that he’d probably dropped his phone to go save that woman and wasn’t currently mad at her but maybe he still was and oh GOD MICHELLE get it TOGETHER, GIRL)_.

The urge to move hit her suddenly, a need to get up and get out and walk until her thoughts made some sort of rational sense, something she was more accustomed to. She grabbed a sketchbook, threw it and some pencils into a bag, shoved her feet into the closest pair of shoes to her, and yelled some kind of reasoning to her mom down the hallway. She was only going to go to the college campus, maybe draw some of the summer class students, but her room was just too small for everything in her brain.

_(and somewhere in the back of her head, she hoped she’d cross Spider-Man’s path, though to what end she wasn’t herself quite sure.)_

 

* * *

iii. a _rush at the beginning_

It was a 24 minute bus ride, give-or-take, to the Queens College campus, and MJ spent that time staring at her annotated _Much Ado About Nothing,_ the book that she’d left in this particular bag the last time she’d used it, but not actually absorbing a word, her head still buzzing with the last half-hour’s revelations. When she got off and hiked through campus to the quad, though, it felt like she could finally breathe again. The air was warm, but carried a hint of the evening’s cooler temperature with it, but the quad was deserted save for a couple stretched out on a blanket.

Why on earth MJ’d picked this campus over the slightly shorter ride to St. John’s or even just a walk around the block was a bit of a mystery to her - but since she was here, and the light was still good, she figured it was as good as time as any to work on a pencil landscape, one of the things she felt still needed work. Maybe as she was drawing her brain would figure out what the hell she was going to do about this Spider-Parker situation.

As she’d hoped, she got drawn into the act of drawing, moving from a landscape to drawing Mets fans from memory to little cartoons of Ned and Peter and Betty and Liz, and before she knew it it was 8:12 and the light was beginning to fade.

In hindsight, walking back down the side of the dark campus when it was out of session was probably not her brightest idea. By that point, all she wanted to do was get home and figure out how to handle the next time Peter gchatted her, and with her pepper spray firmly in hand she figured everything would be fine.

So, of course, it wasn’t. She heard the footsteps behind her, and sped up slightly, hoping that like every other time in her short life so far it was some other commuter trying to get back to the bus. She didn’t want to look around, didn’t want to give whoever it was a reason to think she was scared, but gripped the pepper spray a little tighter, her itching towards the trigger. She was in no way prepared for what happened next.

The owner of the mysterious footsteps draped an arm across her shoulder and muttered “Hey, pretty lady,” in her ear. She tried to bring her spray-hand up, but didn’t fire - of course he was in such a way that if she did, she’d run a serious risk of spraying herself. His hand gripped tighter to her shoulder.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll drop that, pretty lady.”

MJ’s voice felt caught in her throat. To be so stupid, on top of today, and now she was going to die before she even got to figure out what to do about Peter. With the hand that was further away from the guy, she fumbled for her phone. If she could get to it, gchat was her last app open, and Peter should be the last contact, and maybe he could...she had to stop that train of thought. He could be miles from here. He could have gone home! She needed to figure out how to get herself out of this! She hadn’t felt evidence of a weapon, maybe if she twisted she could knee him and run, run to one of the residence halls or...

This last thought was cut off by a gasp from her assailant and the sudden tightening of his arm around her neck. There, in front of them, was the unmistakable silhouette of Spider-Man, lit dramatically from behind by a flickering street light.

For a minute, they just stood there, MJ, the asshole holding her, and Spider-Man. MJ swore she could read surprise in those shoulders, especially since she was acquainted with the way they looked when attached to a face, rather than a mask. She was seized by a sudden urge to call out _hey, Peter, a hand or are you going to stand there like a loser_ but thankfully some form of common sense remained and she just stared at him.

Creeper seemed to get his voice back first, albeit a kind of undignified sqawk. It seemed that word had gotten around about Spider-Man’s feelings about violence against women and MJ found herself being shoved to the ground, palms meeting concrete as whatever jackass had grabbed her beat a hasty retreat. For a breathless second she thought Peter was going to leave her and chase him, and then there he was, kneeling on the sidewalk in front of her, mask-eyes wide.

“Hey M...hey, ma’am, are you okay?”

At the sound of that most familiar voice, MJ gave up and started laughing. Peter started, and sat back on his heels, but didn’t run, shoulders hunching in concern. She reached out a hand toward him, tired of her knees burning, and let him pull her to her feet. The laughter kept bubbling up from some place inside of her, less a reaction of joy than a recognition of how ridiculous, how terrifying, how stupid the whole situation was. He hovered next to her, unwilling to touch her but clearly worried about her - and worried about her in a personal way.

It took a minute, but MJ eventually managed to catch her breath. She closed her eyes, trusting that Peter wouldn’t disappear in the time it took her to figure out her next move. After a few deep breaths, she opened her eyes again, and focused on the red-and-blue clad figure next to her.

“I’m surprised you didn’t go after him,” she said, and winced, the words sounding accusatory. Luckily, he didn’t seem to take it that way, shrugging slightly.

“I, uh, got a picture of him that I’ll send to the cops. I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said, making at least a token attempt this time at disguising his voice. Hearing him try to sound like, she didn’t know, Captain America, almost tipped her over into hysterical laughter again, but she managed to reign it in. This was Peter Parker all the way through, though.

She tried to push herself off the wall they’d found themselves leaning on, but suddenly the rest of the way to the bus stop - and the ride home, and the walk to her building - seemed entirely too daunting. This must have shown on her face _and God, she must really be shaken if she was showing her emotions on her face_ because Peter immediately put out his hand towards her.

“Do you,” his voice caught, “...I don’t know, want me to go with you to where you’re going? I mean I know you don’t know me,” speeding up now, words bumping up against each other in his urge to get them out. “But I’d be happy to take the bus or the train or try to get you a cab...”

MJ cut him off.

“Yes. Please.”

And that was that. He walked with her to the bus stop, rode with her back to her stop, and then walked with her in silence. She appreciated that, him not trying to fill the air with noise, just...being there.

By the time they got back to her building, her heels were burning, and she felt the exhaustion that comes after an adrenaline rush threatening to overtake her. They stood there on the stoop awkwardly, neither one of them seemingly knowing how to end this interaction. He knew her but he thought she didn’t know him, and she knew him and knew that he thought she didn’t know and honestly it made MJ’s head ache to think of it. Some of that was the trauma she was going to have to process with a quart of ice cream later, but most of it was the ridiculously tangled web she had gotten herself into.

She cleared her throat.

“So...this is it. Or not, but it’s close enough. You know. Not to tell a strange guy in tights where I live.”

He started, having clearly forgotten that he was wearing the suit and that he was with her, wearing the suit.

“Oh, yes, well...good night, ma’am!”

MJ didn’t hold back her eye-roll that time, but waved at him once as he backed away, tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, and then disappeared into an alley.

Later that night, her gchat dinged once again.

 

**Google Hangouts - michelle.e2.jones@gmail.com**

**Hangout with jediknightparker@gmail.com**

> **10:06 PM**
> 
> Peter Parker: hey

 

* * *

 

epilogue: _megaphone to my chest_

It was a sunny day, but breezy up on the roof of her building, the first week after their junior year. The world had gone to hell in a handbasket but life was calm now, and all MJ had plans to do was sit there, in the sunshine, with her boyfriend - and maybe work on her Harvard application essay. For now, though, she was content to bask like a cat.

Peter, though, apparently had other ideas.

“When did you figure out I was Spider-Man?” he asked her, low and lazy. She _huffed_ out a laugh in surprise. Of all the questions in the world, that was not one she was expecting. As far as she knew, he thought she found out when he told her, after the events of the blink in time. She thought about it for a second, then decided it’d be worth it - and maybe she’d get an answer on why he’d been so close.

“Remember last summer? When you stopped that creeper who had grabbed me?” She sounded more tentative than she liked, but forged on. “I was only out there because I’d figured out two things, and I couldn’t be in the apartment and needed to just get out, and stayed out later than I’d planned.” She felt his shoulder tensing against hers. “One of them was that you were Spider-Man, you daft boy.”

Now it was his turn to laugh.

“How, though?” he wanted to know.

“You gchatted me, disappeared, and then stopped a mugging. Not that hard,” she countered. “Now, my turn. How did you find me that night?”

He went still and silent for a minute, ignoring the poke of her bony elbow.

“Ned called your apartment when you didn’t pick up your cell phone, your mom said you went out to draw. I was...I don’t know. I was actually in the area but it was getting dark and I just wanted to make sure you were safe not that you can’t keep yourself safe but also you know...” he trailed off.

Thinking back to that night, the way she’d felt so panicked, she couldn’t even conjure up her usual overacted emotion at him. Even then, he’d cared. She poked him in the side, getting a satisfying _ouch_ from him.

A few more minutes passed.

“Wait, you said two things. What was the other thing you’d figured out?”

MJ couldn’t help laughing. She leaned over, kissed him lightly, and said “That I liked you, doofus.”

He grinned so widely at her, as open and happy a smile as she’d seen in a long time, and she grinned right back. Up there, in the open air, she wanted to frame this moment, this peaceful moment of joy.


End file.
